


everything and more (when i get back someday)

by akaparalian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blade of Marmora Keith (Voltron), Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 00:55:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Patience yields focus,he hears in his mind, the afterthought of a memory; the voice that echoes through him is wry and low and just a little bit sardonic. It makes him ache, even more in this moment than usual, with anticipation and longing and loneliness all competing for space in his chest. As though he could be truly patient right now, let alone focused, when he’s soclose,when it’s been (Shiro keeps somewhat obsessive count) thirteen months and twelve days, on a standard Earth calendar.Or: Keith left Voltron years ago to go on deep cover missions for the Blades. Shiro is almost at his breaking point.





	everything and more (when i get back someday)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Wake Up" by Eden.
> 
> It's always interesting dipping your toes into writing in a new fandom for the first time! I've been mainlining as much Sheith fic as I can get my hands on in the past few weeks, so it was exciting to give it a shot myself. Let me know what you think -- you can find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/akaparalian) or [Tumblr.](http://floralegia.tumblr.com) I also have a [Ko-Fi,](https://ko-fi.com/akaparalian) if you're so inclined.
> 
> Enjoy! :D

The room is smokey, and lit in low greens and blues; the music is presumably in some language Shiro couldn’t hope to parse on his own, even after all these years in space, but his universal translator relays it to him as a throaty feminine tone, the words blurring together under the pulse of bodies all around.

So, in short, it’s a nightclub. Evidently, though Shiro hasn’t exactly been to many alien clubs before, this is one of those universal constants, like shopping malls and tabletop roleplaying games, that is recognizable across the whole of civilized space. This isn’t the type of place Shiro’s contact usually chooses to meet him in — it’s too… shiny, somehow, too much neon and chrome and low rolling smoke and hazy fog in the air, not his usual style — but it makes sense for their purposes. The crush of people all around feels totally anonymous, and with that on top of the way he’s dressed, with loose-fitting clothing and a fashionable slash of fabric over most of his face to mask everything below his eyes, Shiro knows no one is looking at him twice. No one, that is, except (hopefully) for the one person who’s here just to find him. He keeps turning around from his spot leaning against a wall to look around the room, sure he’s felt the weight of a familiar gaze on his shoulders, only to be met with nothing.

 _Patience yields focus_ , he hears in his mind, the afterthought of a memory; the voice that echoes through him is wry and low and just a little bit sardonic. It makes him ache, even more in this moment than usual, with anticipation and longing and loneliness all competing for space in his chest. As though he could be truly patient right now, let alone focused, when he’s so _close_ , when it’s been (Shiro keeps somewhat obsessive count) thirteen months and twelve days, on a standard Earth calendar.

He’s not sure if it feels better or worse to think of it that way, rather than in quintants and phoebs and whatever else. It certainly feels more real. 

The song changes, and there’s a noticeable flow of new bodies onto the dancefloor. Shiro scans over as many individuals in the crowd as he can, looking for something, anything, that he recognizes. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, exactly — he never does, only that he’ll know it when he sees it, because he’s looking for the one person in the universe, in _Shiro’s_ universe, who’s as unique and unmistakable and _true_ as the stars in the heavens. (Though given all that he’s learned about the stars in the heavens in the years since he left Earth, maybe that metaphor doesn’t work quite as well as it used to.)

There’s nothing, though, no hint of recognition on any faces, no familiar line in the curve of a dancer’s spine, no rough voice or low laugh that sends shivers across his skin. It’s disappointing, a little bit, but not necessarily surprising: Shiro’s contact is good at what he does. Scary good. That’s why Shiro is meeting him here, after all, in this nightclub after thirteen months and twelve days and just about seven hours apart, becuase he can’t be where Shiro wants him, needs him, to be —

“The sky is beautiful tonight, don’t you think?” a voice — _that voice_ — murmurs in his ear, melting in out of absolutely nowhere. Shiro’s blood runs hot and cold all at once.

He has to hold himself back as he turns, keeping the motion slow and casual and inviting, like he’s just any other clubgoer who’s been approached by a potential hookup. Shiro’s straining at the edges of his peripheral vision as he moves, though, desperate for something, anything, any glimpse.

And then, suddenly, there he is. He’s concealed under foreign and oddly-fitting clothes and wearing colored contacts, but it’s absolutely, undeniably Keith.

Shiro practically chokes on his next inhale. On the one hand, there’s relief and euphoria crashing through him as his mental counter reading _thirteen months and twelve days and seven hours and twenty-three minutes_ resets to zero. On the other, there’s already the creeping, crushing sense that this is temporary, as ephemeral as the flash of the colored lights as they pass over Keith’s cheekbones.

He looks good, at least, whole and healthy, which doesn’t necessarily go without saying. The last time Shiro had seen him, he’d had a ring of thick bruises fading around his neck from a close call with a guard, when he’d very nearly been found out. Those bruises were still better than the alternative, as Keith had pointed out when Shiro had commented on them at the time; if he hadn’t been able to get out of that particular scrape, there would have been no time or means to call for extraction. He would have been killed, and it would have been weeks, at the minimum, before Shiro even found out about it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shiro manages, after a long, heavy moment where all he can do is stare. He’s _earned_ that moment, damn it. “I can think of at least a few things more beautiful than the sky.”

It’s just as well that the naked want and yearning in his voice as he rakes his eyes up and down over Keith’s whole body one more time before finally meeting his gaze fit their little facade of strangers meeting for a casual fling, because Shiro doesn’t think he could contain it if he tried. God, every part of him is crying out to touch, to reach out and pull Keith close and never let him go ever, ever, ever again.

Keith’s eyes — disconcertingly yellowish in color from the contacts he’s wearing, but endlessly familiar as they dance with warmth and humor and need — flash in the dim light, and he hums low in approval as he moves in just a little closer, and then closer still, until he’s crowding Shiro up against the wall because there’s nowhere else to go. 

“Will you show me?” he says; Shiro watches the way his mouth forms the words and shivers at the raw feeling of being close to him.

“Think you can handle it?” His voice is so close to cracking right down the middle and falling away into nothing, but Shiro’s not thinking about it. He can’t think about much of anything at the moment, caught up fully in the bow of Keith’s mouth and the way he’s close enough now that Shiro can smell him, the familiar and painfully tantalizing scent that faded off of Shiro’s pillowcases so long ago now that he wonders sometimes if it was ever really there at all.

Keith’s smirk could cut glass, and it melts something low in Shiro’s abdomen. “Oh, I can handle _anything_ you can give me.”

“Anything?” Shiro breathes. He’s bracketed into the wall by Keith’s shorter, slighter frame, but that doesn’t stop him from leaning forward into his space. His hands move automatically to settle in Keith’s hair, hanging loose around his face and neck, long enough to curl over the tops of his shoulders.

“Anything,” Keith repeats, and when he leans up and in to press their lips together, Shiro loses whatever last remaining shreds of sanity he was still clinging onto.

—

The problem is that Keith was _too good_ at being a Blade. He took to it too well, like he took to piloting too well, and the need was there, and Shiro _wasn’t_ there when he should have been, and all at once Keith was on mission after mission, in deep cover, no longer a paladin of Voltron but something else, something that lived only in the shadows. Something that Shiro only got to see in flashes and clung to desperately whenever possible.

It’s been over four years of this now, and in that time, Shiro’s been able to see him exactly five times — six, now, including this one. Allegedly they meet up because Shiro is one of Keith’s official contacts with the Coalition, still straining onward, and Keith is one of their top informants, always coming up to the surface with intel so good Shiro _knows_ he might easily have died trying to get it and then diving back down again.

But they never seem to spend more than the bare minimum of their time actually talking shop.

—

They make their way to a back room easily enough, not attracting any undue attention, as far as Shiro can tell. Keith seems to know this place blind, but it’s impossible to guess whether that’s from past experience or just recon, and it doesn’t seem like a question that’s important enough to ask. The important part is, they have a small space to themselves, with a door that locks, just far enough from the dance floor that all they get is a muffled, pounding bass. The _exact_ instant the door shuts behind them, Keith is crowding Shiro up against it.

“I have a confession,” he mutters against the column of Shiro’s throat, his lips dragging against the skin.

Shiro shivers. “Yeah?”

“I may have exaggerated how time-sensitive this intel is,” Keith admits. His fingers are already working their way up Shiro’s shirt like he just can’t help himself; he’s shoving fabric bluntly out of the way and makes a soft, disgruntled noise at how _much_ of it there is, all there in the interest of blurring Shiro’s profile. “I mean, obviously it’s good data, but I just couldn’t go any fucking longer without seeing you.”

Something in Shiro’s chest twists a little oddly; he’s sure that he should probably feel at least a shred of guilt over that, given that what they’re doing could easily prove to be very dangerous if Keith was tailed on his way here, or is tailed on his way back, or if either one of them is recognized or remembered by even _one_ person who might mention something to someone they don’t want to be mentioned to, but he absolutely does not. He’s _glad_ — glad that Keith is here, glad that they’re together, and glad that he’s not the only one who was apparently about three seconds away from jumping in the nearest ship and just fucking hightailing it to somewhere where they could be together, damn the consequences. It’s been _thirteen months_ (and twelve days, and seven hours, and…).

“I’ve missed you so much,” Shiro says quietly, winding a hand into Keith’s hair and tugging him back slightly so that he can look him in the eye. Keith meets his gaze steadily; Shiro can see a desperation and a banked flame behind his eyes that match those in his own chest perfectly. The few times they’ve been able to meet like this since Keith left Voltron, it’s always been a struggle of competing desires all trying to command Shiro’s attention and their very limited time: to ask Keith about his mission and make sure that he’s okay, to whisper into his hair all the different ways that he’s loved and hope the words wrap around him like armor to keep him safe, to kiss him breathless, to stay still and just hold him close…

But while Shiro wavers, trying to make an impossible choice between all the things he wants most in the world, Keith has rarely been accused of being hesitant. Shiro doubts that the choice is really all that much _easier_ for him, but he certainly moves forward with it more decisively, his eyes fluttering shut as he draws Shiro’s mouth down to cover his own.

They can work with this little scrap of time and privacy, Shiro thinks as their lips catch and slide together, and _he_ can work with Keith’s choice of strategy here to hopefully fit in as many of his own priorities as possible. It’s not as if their desires aren’t the same or similar, after all.

They’ve always been a good team.

Shiro pulls back, just slightly, gasping for breath in the scant space that separates his mouth and Keith’s. Their hips align as Keith shifts up against him, and their chests are pressed together as they both crowd into as much closeness as they can possibly get. Shiro’s mouth forms soundless shapes for a few moments before he groans, “ _Keith_.”

Keith hums back at him. Shiro feels it in the hairsbreadth of space between their mouths when he smirks, the twist of his lips full of affection and humor. “Yes?” he teases, his voice rough around the edges, crackling low.

Even with his eyes squeezed shut tight, with his pulse pounding in his ears, with his head spinning with want and with foreknowledge of the dizzying ache of loneliness in his very near future, the tone of Keith’s voice makes Shiro’s heart sing.

“I don’t know what I want to do to you first,” he admits without really thinking about it, because Keith’s presence cuts through each and every one of his filters with ease and sense his internal monologue spinning out of his mouth if he’s not careful. “There’s not enough _time_.”

Keith makes a considering noise, raw enough to let Shiro know that he feels the time pressure, too. But his tone is still teasing when he murmurs, “I have a few ideas,” into Shiro’s mouth, parted around a gasp.

It’s impossible not to chase after his kisses at that, not that there’s far to go. The catch of Keith’s teeth in Shiro’s lips is heady — familiar and yet new, the way it’s new every time, the way it’s never the same twice. Keith is steady and dedicated and constant in Shiro’s life, not without temper, but _enduring_ , like low-burning embers. Kissing him, though, has always been a wildfire, shifting and flaring up without warning and filling Shiro’s lungs with smoke until he can hardly breathe.

Even as they move against each other, fumbling their remaining clothing out of the way to bring themselves skin-to-skin, even among the onslaught of sensations that should serve to keep Shiro grounded in the present moment, he can feel time slipping away and falling through his grasp. He traces metal fingers up the graceful arch of Keith’s spine, and then suddenly in the next moment he’s on his knees, looking up at Keith through his eyelashes and breathing wetly against the front of his undersuit, and it’s like he can’t even remember how he got there, like it happened in the blink of an eye. Shiro blinks, and Keith is twitching in his mouth, groaning lowly as Shiro clutches one hand over his hip. He blinks again, and he’s swallowing down the bitter-salty tang of Keith’s come, and Keith is hauling him to his feet, murmuring filthy praises against his lips, moaning at the taste of himself lingering on Shiro’s tongue as they kiss.

It’s too fast, it’s an endless flood of sensations all at once, it’s going to be gone again so soon. _Keith_ is going to be gone so soon. Neither of them want it to be true, but it _is_ , and frankly, Shiro’s tired of it, tired of acting like it doesn’t feel like he’s missing yet another limb when he’s trying to lead without Keith by his side and trying to pretend that these stolen visits and rendezvouses aren’t the brightest, most brilliant parts of his life.

There’s a rising bubble of panic in his chest even as Keith brings him off with a well-practiced, calloused hand. It almost makes him want to cry, but instead he bends to rest his head on Keith’s shoulder as he comes, eyes pressed tightly shut while Keith’s hand keeps moving between them. 

“I love you,” he murmurs into the sweat-salted skin above Keith’s collarbone.

“I love you, too,” Keith sighs back, but not until several moments later, when his hands have settled over Shiro’s chest, one curving over his heart. 

Shiro has to swallow back bile before he can speak again. “How long do you have?”

It’s the last question he wants to ask, which is why he hasn’t asked it already, but he needs to know. He expects minutes, but lets himself hope for hours, prays for a day. Just one day. He used to think they’d have _years_.

“Not long,” Keith says lowly, and the frustration and yearning in his voice are painfully familiar.

Shiro sighs, and he forces himself to take a deep breath before he responds. There are a hundred million things he could say, most of them either foolish, pointless, or cruel, or else some combination of the three. He could beg Keith to stay with him, plead with him to slip off into the vast expanses of the galaxy somewhere with Shiro by his side. They could lay low, live quietly, and eventually people would stop looking for them. They could be together.

Part of him even thinks that Keith would agree to that, if he asked.

But, of course, he can’t — won’t — ask. Keith is doing to much good with the Blades, and Shiro is doing too much good with Voltron, and compared with the pooled weight of their duty, what does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, if they have to be apart? What does it matter if all they can have together are these stolen hours?

“Let’s make it count, then,” Shiro says, and pulls Keith to him as tight as he can.


End file.
